


Just Girly Things

by geminnie



Category: Original Work
Genre: Anger, Angst, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Dark, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Eating Disorders, Elements of Horror, Femininity, Gore, Hurt, Implied Child Abuse, Introspection, Kinda, Poems, Rage, Violence, anger issues, bird imagery, body image issues, horrow, kind of?? not really, literally just word vomit, prose, sorta - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:15:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27651208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geminnie/pseuds/geminnie
Summary: The honest truth of the matter is that she’s built to be sturdy. That her mother was built the same. All broad shoulders and thick wrists, ankles connected to wide feet, and chests connected to strong necks. Even as her mother shrinks. She doesn’t fill her frame anymore; she leaves it half vacant. Even as her bones poke from her skin and eyes sink deeper, she never becomes delicate; she never becomes frail.A collection of short stories about stuff.
Relationships: women/femininity
Kudos: 4





	1. Sparrow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She craves delicacy like some people crave fullness. She waits and wills for that careful emptiness to overtake her. There is something so captivating in that painstaking area between fading and lovely, in the bird-thin presence of barely-there models on magazines. It feels like the world doesn’t want her to be vibrant. She’s adamantine where she should be soft and giving, all endless tenderness where she should be sharp edges. Her bones start poking out of her skin. She likes it.

She craves delicacy like some people crave fullness. She waits and wills for that careful emptiness to overtake her. There is something so captivating in that painstaking area between fading and lovely, in the bird-thin presence of barely-there models on magazines. It feels like the world doesn’t want her to be vibrant. She’s adamantine where she should be soft and giving, all endless tenderness where she should be sharp edges. Her bones start poking out of her skin. She likes it.

When she was a child there were endless trees outside her window. Branches breaking down into frail twigs. She knows she bruises easily, from playground spats to unkind hands to endless falls from evergreens. She thinks that she’d like it. She’d like it if her outside reflected her insides: brittle boned, fragile, barbed. Meticulous hands pleat her hair into delicate braids; she thinks of the space that she steals. Her mother is shrinking, electrifying laughter fading to grey and endless silence. She looks at diaphanous women on the television and thinks _I want to be like you someday._

For a moment, as she grows into herself, she rebels. There was an adolescent with flame-bright hair and effervescent energy and extravagant, vibrant love for life. She finds that she’s bad at being vivid. She slips back into her world of pastels and greyscale, and no one even notices she’s gone.

She thinks that one day she’ll fade so much, shrink so much, she’ll disappear. She thinks that one day someone will look up and realize she’s not there. She thinks that one day the foggy distance of the world will fully blanket her in the comfort of security, away from the precarious and complicated life she once led, and she’ll sigh, and she’ll sob, but part of her will be relieved. And she’ll walk through the world a shade of herself, finally released from the turbulent bonds of living. Sometimes it feels like she’s got one less layer of skin, like everything hurts her just a bit more. She thinks of bird-thin women with dull eyes and wonders if they’re the lucky ones. She thinks of the stinging and violent world she lives in and says yes. She thinks of her brilliant puerile self and says _no._

The honest truth of the matter is that she’s built to be sturdy. That her mother was built the same. All broad shoulders and thick wrists, ankles connected to wide feet, and chests connected to strong necks. Even as her mother shrinks. She doesn’t fill her frame anymore; she leaves it half vacant. Even as her bones poke from her skin and eyes sink deeper, she never becomes delicate; she never becomes frail. Her mouth stretches with silent pleas, _why won’t you let me be breakable? Why won’t you let me just shatter? Why draw it out?_ But no one answers. She shrinks into herself, diminishing, and contemplates how hollow-bonded and brittle she can become.


	2. Kindling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes… it feels like there is a monster under her skin. Straining, straining to get out, stretching her skin until it nearly tears. Sometimes, it feels like it has claws. Like it’s carving up her insides, like at any moment she’ll vomit blood as it destroys her organs to make space for itself. Sometimes, it feels like it knows her more than anyone else, like it sees through the facade of a girl she puts up, right into her searing core. Sometimes, it feels like it is her.

Sometimes… it feels like there is a monster under her skin. Straining, straining to get out, stretching her skin until it nearly tears. Sometimes, it feels like it has claws. Like it’s carving up her insides, like at any moment she’ll vomit blood as it destroys her organs to make space for itself. Sometimes, it feels like it knows her more than anyone else, like it sees through the facade of a girl she puts up, right into her searing core. Sometimes, it feels like it is her.

She remembers playing with the other girls, before they realized she was wrong, before they realized she was _vile._ She remembers the feeling of thread under her hands, the methodical weaving of bracelets, the thought of how fragile it was, of how she could pull and pull and pull until it snapped. She remembers thinking the same thing as she ran her hand down the back of her then-friend’s hamster.

She didn’t have many friends after that.

That was when they truly realized there was something blistering and volatile about her. That was when they discovered she was best left alone. Sometimes, she thinks they’re right.

She remembers sneaking her cousin’s true crime magazine from him one summer. Finding a two-page spread about serial killers. She remembers reading about them delighting in torturing and killing animals; she never enjoyed it, they were just so fragile. She had child-clumsy hands that didn’t understand the word delicate yet. She didn’t mean to. None of the other girls came to school with blood crusted under their fingernails, though.

She remembers sitting pressed against her mother’s side in the counselor's office. This counselor was an older woman with wrinkled hands and an eye-searingly bright colored cardigan. She looked kind. Her words were not. It was hard to pay attention with the rage remaining from a schoolyard scrap still buzzing through her brain. Sometimes, rage felt like it filled her from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. It consumed her. It would pool in her hands by her nails and behind her teeth. She fought like a rabid animal. All sharp scratches and bloody bites. The counselor prattled on endlessly; she filled the air with words like, “a danger” and “unstable.” She knew the counselor was right, but that didn’t stop her from looking up at her mom with wide, pleading eyes. _Please say she’s wrong,_ she thought, _please say I’m normal._ Her mom just looked down at her, tired, and after a moment of silence, she nodded to the councilor. Sometimes, she regrets hoping that her mom would speak up. Sometimes, she still feels the stinging betrayal. Sometimes, she thinks her mom was right to agree.

There is something _wrong_ with her. It feels like she is burning, boiling from the inside out. She constantly feels cornered, hunted. There is something abominable about her, about the raging tempest, barely contained by the fracturing shell of her mother’s daughter. She is hazardous. She is dangerous. She is one wrong step from exploding. She doesn’t want to be like this; she can’t control herself anymore. She feels like she’s drowning in her rage, being pulled deeper into it every day by a current she can’t explain. Soon she knows that there is a monster inside of her, one that only feels satisfied by bloodied teeth and sated desires. Violence comes naturally to her, like it’s what she was born to do. She feels feral, uncontrollable, frenzied, and furious. She’s going nowhere fast, and she’s scrambling for hold of the life she had before, not caring that her nails are gouging deep scratches onto the people that she clings to. She never wonders when her hands got so bloody.

One day she realizes that she is just kindling.

_And she burns._


	3. Starlet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There wasn’t a weekend in high school she didn’t attend some social gathering, there wasn’t an arts program she didn’t dominate. She had friends on friends on friends on friends and not a single one of them thought she was forgettable. Her mother never stopped talking about her achievements.
> 
> She was so miserable, sometimes it felt like a physical weight.

There were times, as a child, when she felt invisible. Like her mother’s eyes would just glide over her, like the other children never even saw her when picking teams in gym. She never hated anything quite as much as the shaky uncertainty of reminding others of her existence. She would make sure that they would never forget again.

As a child, this came from vibrance and skill. She was never shy again, always ready to shoot her hand up in class, always ready to say what she wanted. She filled herself with knowledge, with skill, throwing herself into her mother’s ordered violin and piano lessons, endlessly practicing her ballet steps and her careful finding a million different ways to shine. She would be so brilliant, so bright, that they would have to see her. It worked. Her mother constantly fawned over her little prodigy, and her teachers praised her admirable focus in her studies. It didn’t work as well for her classmates, but they could be won over with cool confidence and rule-breaking adventures. She prided herself in the way that people began to orbit her, and she decided that she would never go unnoticed again.

As a teenager, she discovered a new way to get attention: sex appeal. She discovered that lowcut shirts and highcut shorts could make people look at you and look at you and look at you. She discovered that she could cover herself in shiny-bright-sparkly accessories and clothe herself in brilliant colors until she was so striking that no one could tear their eyes away. She shaped herself, one part sharp, high definition brilliance, two parts striving for the next stunning surprise, and another secret part, small and terrified of never being seen. There wasn’t a weekend in high school she didn’t attend some social gathering, there wasn’t an arts program she didn’t dominate. She had friends on friends on friends on friends and not a single one of them thought she was forgettable. Her mother never stopped talking about her achievements.

She was so miserable, sometimes it felt like a physical weight.

As an adult, she realized that she was so focused on being vibrant and noticeable that she forgot how to be herself. She realized she couldn’t surprise people forever, and that one day she would slip up and that tiny, pathetic child she once was would show, and everything she’d worked for would crumble. Sometimes, she thinks that might make her happier.

**Author's Note:**

> hurr burr Gemini writes pretentious crap  
> tumblr: gem-minnie


End file.
